Hollywood Playbook: Thursday's Top 5 News Items

1. Disney’s ‘Frozen’ Is Not Homosexual Propaganda

As I mentioned in this column yesterday, The Hollywood Reporter and Daily Beast have both used an obscure pastor and blog post to trash conservatives in general, and religious Christians specifically, as gay-panicked over Disney’s animated hit “Frozen,” which arrives on Bluray next week. The media using nobodies to smear everyone on the political and Christian right is nothing new (See: Akin, Todd), but that doesn’t mean the obscure pastor and blog post are wrong.

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So, is Disney’s “Frozen” an insidious but brilliant piece of homosexual propaganda?

We are writing to provide you advance notice that the price of your Prime membership will be increasing in 2015. Your 2014 annual renewal will remain at the original price of $79. On April 4, 2015, your membership will renew at $99/year.

So it will now cost me $8.25 a month for free two-day shipping, a ton of free TV and movie streaming options, and access to 500,000 books I can borrow via Kindle.

That is still ridiculously cheap.

3. SyFy Wants the Next ‘Walking Dead,’ Less ‘Sharknado’

I have always loved the idea of the Sci-Fi and now SyFy Channel, but the number of commercials made the channel too oppressive to watch. Even with a DVR that allows you to zip through the ads, the every 5 to 7-minute commercial break just makes the channel too much work.

Maybe that has changed since I gave up.

Anyway, the channel is making another change — this time back to its roots as a sci-fi channel.

“We want to be the best science-fiction channel that we possibly can, and in some respects, that means going back to the more traditional sci-fi/fantasy that fans often say they feel we’ve exited,” Howe tells THR. “We’re going to occupy that space in a way we haven’t for the past few years.”

SyFy hasn’t had a breakout since “Battlestar Galactica,” which went off the air in 2009. That was a SyFy series I did watch, but only after Netflix streamed it … without commercials.

‘Sharknado’ wasn’t really the phenomenon some believe it was. It blew up on Twitter, but the ratings were nothing spectacular. Overall, SyFy might feel the whole “Sharknado” thing damaged the brand as a lame, jokey genre channel.